I don't even know where to start with this.
We had terminals that were way faster than you could type or see 30 years ago. They didn't need a GPU and ran on a CPU 1000 times slower than what we have now.
If this is progress... I'm not sure I want it
If this is progress... I'm not sure I want it
And the GPUs were character-based, with only 256 different characters, usually 16 colors/each. That's the main reason for the hardware requirements. Essentially, these shaders emulate a character-based fixed function GPU from 30 years ago, adding features like more colors, Unicode, and custom fonts.
Modern displays at 1920x1080 in millions of colors.
30 years ago a terminal was the whole display and nothing more. Now its a single window amid dozens of other windows including content ranging from high definition video to real-time rasterized 3D graphics.
Yes, that's progress.
VGA was introduced 31 years ago, in 1987. The text mode was 80x25 characters, 9x16 pixels/each, so the effective output resolution was 720x400 pixels. I currently develop a device with similar one, 800x480, only now I have GPU and GLES 3.2.
Back to the old times, because RAM was so expensive, that high resolution only worked in text mode, where the frame buffer only had 2 bytes per character, one for character itself, another for attributes i.e. background and foreground colors.
Graphic modes had way lower resolution, indeed.